FC4 and external hard drive (USB)

[Jonathan Underwood]

Jonathan Berry wrote:

> 
> Nice name ;).  

My parents thought so :)

> I would highly suggest that you consider buying a hard
>  drive enclosure and an internal drive to go in it.  I think you can 
> get a lot more for your money that way, and you can have more control
>  over the kind of enclosure you get.  An enclosure will cost you
> about $30 - $40 probably and then you can use an internal drive which
> are generally much less expensive, especially if you don't mind
> rebates. I have a CompUSA USB enclosure with a 250 GB Matxor drive
> and it works quite well with Fedora.  I'm not a fan of Maxtor or any
> other drive manufacturer, it was just the best deal at the time.  The
> drive does get warm when in use, but the heat does not seem
> excessive.

This is the route I have taken. I did some considerable research into 
hard drive enclosures with IDE-USB  chipsets before purchasing such an 
enclosure, and it turns out that many of the ones with USB2.0 and 
Firewire ports are based on the PL-3507 chipset, which seems to cause 
major headaches with even the latest kernels, and even the other 
operating system. So I avoided those, and went for one of these in the end:

http://www.rlsupplies.co.uk/products/product.asp?id=156494

I was keen to get an aluminium one to dissipate heat. This one doesn't 
have a fan, however. I would in the future buy one with a fan. I stuck a 
Seagate Barracuda 80 GB drive in there (set as master), and it all seems 
to work fantastically with FC4.

Thanks for the advice, everyone.

Jonathan.